About

Welcome to our nature photography blog! We're Cat and Steve Branam, amateur photographers in Maine, USA. Cat is an operating room nurse (LinkedIn profile), and Steve is an embedded systems software engineer (i.e. geek! LinkedIn profile).

We love birding and astronomy. We're just beginners, learning and playing. We love to share our photos and what we learn.

We pinch ourselves everyday that we're so lucky to live in a place like this! And if you're wondering what "downeast Maine" means, it means you have to sail downwind eastward from Boston to get here.

There have been amazing technological advances in photography. You'll see posts here on the technology as well as the photos. Optics and optical coatings have improved, but the real revolution is in combining that with digital electronics and image processing.

What's even more amazing is that the technological advances have made incredible imaging capability accessible to amateurs and hobbyists. Nature photos and astrophotography that used to take professional skills and equipment or even NASA-level resources are now achievable for a modest investment in equipment.